I bought the Orange Box about three weeks ago, and now that I’ve had plenty of time to play with it, I think it’s time for a review. The Orange Box as an overall package really is the best deal I’ve ever seen in a game package. It’s not at all over-hyped. I could see a pack of games of this quality selling for 49.95 maybe a year or two years after it came out, not on the first day. Any one of the included games would be worth $50 to me, with the possible exception of Portal, which is quite short, but a gem nonetheless. For reference, the Orange Box includes Half Life 2, Half Life 2: Episode 1, Half Life 2: Episode 2, Team Fortress 2, and Portal. If you already have HL2 and/or E1 on your account, they will become available as a gift, which you can give to anyone you like with a Steam account.
Portal: $20 by itself on Steam, or $50 in the Orange Box - **4.5 Stars**
I hadn’t read much about Portal when I bought the Orange Box, but it looked interesting, so it was the second thing I played, after Team Fortress 2. It’s an amazingly well-done first person puzzle game, and is one of the most novel and entertaining games I’ve ever played. You play as an android who is participating in a testing program run by a company called Aperture Science. You are given a gun that shoots portals. The gun (after the first few levels, where you gain upgrades) can shoot 2 simultaneous portals, one blue and one orange. When you walk through one, you come out the other. In order to complete the puzzles, you’ll have to do a combination of walking through portals to access otherwise unreachable areas, jumping through portals (your momentum is unaffected, so if you fall at high speed into a portal on the floor, you can launch yourself out of a linked portal on the wall with great speed), throwing objects through portals, etc. The puzzles are challenging and rewarding, but none are so hard as to be uncompleteable. Throughout the game you are guided by a computerized voice, called GlaDOS. She (yes, she’s a she) helps you learn the ropes and guide you through the tests, and is one of my favorite parts of the game. Some of her comments are so utterly hilarious that I was forced to stop in the middle of the puzzle I was working on and just laugh and pound my desk. I don’t want to give anything away regarding the game’s resolution, but I’ll just say this: watch the credits. The credits feature a song, and the song makes them the BEST credits ever seen in the gaming community, and make the credits an immaculate ending for what I feel is a flawless game. The only reason I didn’t give it 5 stars is because the game took me less than two hours to complete. It has some replay value due to the entertaining narration and Advanced Maps and Challenges unlockable upon completion, but I was starving for more puzzles when I beat the game. From what I’ve heard, the game was really a test by Valve of the portal gun, which may be used in future games, possibly even a future Half Life game. The possibilities are endless. In addition, if you’re feeling adventurous, there is a fairly simple method that allows you to play the maps from Half Life 2 with the portal gun. I’ll post the link when I get home (at school right now) or it can be found easily on Google. Team Fortress 2: $30 by itself on Steam, or $50 in OB - **5 Stars**
TF2 is really the only reason I bought the Orange Box at all. I enjoyed HL2, but I never was obsessed with it enough to play through all of Episode 1. However, when Valve announced that HL2:E2 would include TF2, there was really no decision. The first videos of Team Fortress captivated me, and now that TF2 is finally (finally, finally, finally) here, it’s completely worth the wait. The graphics are highly stylized, almost cartoonish, but instead of being a fault (some people have criticized the game for its cartoonish style), this enhances the game’s feel and experience. The designers of TF2 stated that because all shooters are destined to be unrealistic in some aspect, instead of trying to make up for it with hyperrealistic graphics, they would exaggerate in the other direction. The physics in the game are also unreal, but insanely fun, featuring Soldiers and Demomen launching themselves into the air using explosions and double-jumping scouts. The combination of style and physics make this game a perfect blend, and the end result is a game that is fun to play and, at times, hilarious. I think that this game is more similar in gameplay to Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory than Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, it’s quasi-sequel, is, due to its smaller map size, more emphasized team work, and pure fun to play. Quake Wars is great, but its gameplay is much more like the Battlefield games, with the much larger maps and vehicles. These large sizes can lead to people just rushing to vehicles and trying to play vigilante and kill the whole team themselves. In Team Fortress, Medics team up with Heavies and decimate the enemies, demomen and engineers help each other defend objectives, etc. Teamwork is essential to victory, thanks to extremely well-designed classes and maps. There’s even a few custom maps popping up, and custom-map-dedicated servers. In summary, buy this game: it’s the best multiplayer shooter of the year, and more than likely, the decade.
Regarding HL2:E2, I haven’t actually played all the way through it yet, due to being busy with my “life” and TF2, but when I finish it, I’ll post a review.
Also, there’s a great Flash version of Portal at http://www.portal.wecreatestuff.com. I highly recommend it if you want to see the concept of Portal before shelling out the cash.
